I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

Video: Mike Daisey Buster Rob Schmitz Shows How iPads Are Really Made

Journalism won out over sensationalism when Marketplace‘s Shanghai Bureau Chief Rob Schmitz double-checked Mike Daisey’s story about Chinese manufacturer Foxconn. Seemingly in return, Foxconn granted Schmitz exclusive video access to the production lines where the new iPad is made.

In fairness to Daisey, he now admits that the stories that make up The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs were a pastiche of things that happened, or may have happened, at many factories over an unspecified time frame. The Marketplace video does not directly refute issues about exploding aluminum dust or the use of toxic solvents—we don’t see those parts of the production line. And instead of lots of fine-motor handwork we see workers using updated automation. So the video does not represent all of what is or has gone on in Chinese tech factories, but it does believably represent where it’s going, towards speed and quality control over massive hand labor.

The work does look crushingly boring, but not hazardous. The workers look stoic and tired, but not particularly exploited. It is easy to see, in this video, the other side of the narrative, the one described by Leslie Chang in her new book Factory Girls. Young girls in rural villages stifled by their families and lack of opportunity. Of the girls’ parents, Chang writes, “At every stage they gave bad advice; they specialised in outdated knowledge and conservatism born out of fear … But once a migrant got to the city, the parental message shifted dramatically: Send home money, the more the better.”

And so it’s less dramatic, this reality that is behind the Apple products we love and want more of. We don’t have to feel particularly conflicted. There is massive inequality in this world and we in the U.S. are high on the hog. And in China these workers are not conflicted. They want to make money. The more the better.

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